Moving From Marketplaces to Your Own Store: When and How?

Many businesses start e-commerce on a marketplace, and that is often the right start. A ready customer base, a familiar checkout and first orders that arrive quickly make it easier to learn the business. After a while, though, other questions come up. How much does the fee taken from each sale cut into your profit? How do you compete with a seller offering the same product for less? Will the customer who bought your product find you on their next purchase, or another seller? We compared which channel suits you in a separate article. This one is for businesses that have made the decision, or are about to, and focuses on how to make the move.

When does the move make sense?

You do not have to wait for things to go badly on the marketplace to open your own site. On the contrary, a business with steady marketplace sales is more ready for the move: it knows which products sell, what customers ask and why returns come in. If several of the signs below apply to you, it may be time to plan your own site:

• After commissions and service fees, there is almost no profit left on some products.
• You have repeat customers, but you cannot reach them directly.
• Customers have started searching for your brand name or asking for your product by name.
• A change in the marketplace's rules or category structure can affect your sales within a short time.
• You have needs the marketplace does not meet, such as selling to dealers and business customers or selling abroad.

On the other hand, if your product range is very narrow and you have no difference other than price, or if you cannot set aside time and budget for advertising and content work to bring visitors to your site, do not rush. Your own site will not attract visitors by itself. The traffic the platform brings you on the marketplace is traffic you have to bring to your own site yourself.

You do not have to leave the marketplace

The word "move" can be misleading. For most businesses, the right model is not to leave the marketplace but to add their own site as a second main channel. The marketplace remains the way to reach new customers, while your own site becomes the place to keep those customers and sell to them again. On your own site, you can collect email and phone details with the customer's consent and announce your new products and campaigns to them directly. The only condition for running both channels together is that product and stock information is managed from one place. Otherwise the same product sells in two places at once, prices do not match and half the day goes into correcting quantities between two panels.

A step-by-step plan for the move

You can use the order below to bring your own site into play without disrupting your marketplace sales.

• Gather your product data. The product names, descriptions, images and product codes you uploaded to the marketplace are the raw material for the move. Export this information and collect it in a single spreadsheet; give each product and variant a single code. Expand the descriptions you shortened to fit the marketplace's rules for your own site.
• Set up payment, shipping and the legal side. On your own site, you take the payment yourself. The virtual POS (online card payment) application, the bank transfer (havale/EFT) option and the shipping agreement are handled at this step; the preliminary information form, distance sales contract, returns text and KVKK (Turkey's personal data protection law) texts are prepared in the same period.
• Choose the main source for stock. Stock is kept either in your site's admin panel or in your accounting software and passed to the marketplace from there. Once the marketplace integration is set up, products, prices and stock are managed from a single panel, and marketplace orders also land in the same panel.
• Write down your pricing policy. Since you pay no commission on your own site, you can offer customers an extra advantage, such as a better price, free shipping or a discount on repeat purchases. Also check the marketplace's price and campaign rules in your contract.
• Go live with test orders. Place an order with a real card, refund it, and try the shipping and invoice steps. Meanwhile, your marketplace sales continue as normal.
• Bring visitors to your own site. Advertising, search engine work, your social media accounts and your existing customer relationships are the tools for this. Before putting material that promotes your own site into packages for marketplace orders, read the marketplace's rules; some marketplaces restrict directing customers to another sales channel.
• Measure and find the balance. In the first months, track each channel's revenue, profit and return rate separately. Which product is more profitable on which channel becomes clear over time; some products do better on the marketplace, others on your own site.

Set the right expectations from the start, too. Your own site's sales may lag behind the marketplace in the first months, and that is normal. Your product reviews, sales history and visibility on the marketplace built up over time; your own site's trust and its place in search engines will build up over time as well. Planning the move not as a trial of a few weeks but as a channel that grows over months makes it easier to make the right decisions.

The most common mistakes when making the move

• Closing your marketplace store overnight: cutting off your main source of income before your own site starts attracting visitors puts a strain on your cash flow.
• Keeping stock by hand in two separate places: on the first busy day, this leads to the same product selling on two channels and to cancellations.
• Copying product descriptions as they are: the same text can be found at many sellers and is often not enough for your own site to stand out in search engines.
• Opening the site and waiting: a site with no planned advertising and search engine work gets very few visitors in its first months.
• Not setting up measurement: to see which channel really leaves a profit, sales and visitor behavior need to be measured from the start.

Ask yourself before you start

Before deciding on the move, write down answers to these questions: Is my product data collected in a single spreadsheet? Which system will I manage stock from? Who will prepare what for the virtual POS, shipping and legal texts? Which channel will bring the first visitors to the site, and how much time can I give it? Which products will stay only on the marketplace, and which will sell on both channels? Once these answers are clear, the move stops being a risk and becomes a planned growth step.

When Adorb builds a custom e-commerce site for you, it moves your existing products and images to the new platform, sets up the connection that lets it work alongside marketplaces such as Trendyol and Hepsiburada, and runs the site's advertising, SEO and measurement with the same team. That way your own channel grows while your marketplace sales continue.